Thammasat University students interested in law, communications, political science, history, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 2 February Zoom webinar on International Law and Communications Infrastructure: A History.
The event, on Friday, 2 February 2024 at 8pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes books about different aspects of communications infrastructure.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rEkLvevlS2m1nlTSiM6pZA#/
The event webpage explains:
This research examines international law’s longstanding entanglement with communications infrastructure. There is increasing concern regarding the rise of private global power in the form of global digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. This paper responds by focusing on historical connections between international law and infrastructure as a means of examining their relationship in the global communications context. This reveals a longer trajectory to current interest in information capitalism’s effects on international life.
Current concerns focus on the power of private digital platforms and the networked communicative infrastructure they maintain for the global economy. Introducing an historical perspective to such debates highlights infrastructure’s ongoing connections to violence and exploitation. This points to the wider and constitutive role of infrastructure in international life and underscores the need to address the blending of public and private forms of power in global governance.
While the technologies driving change and re-appraisal within the contemporary international legal imagination are clearly distinct, viewing infrastructure as regulation in the current day requires us to confront continuing patterns of inequality and discrimination, which in turn can be connected with a longer international legal history. Such a focus can also help to explain how the traditional form of international law as a limited system of positive rules and of managerial ordering came to dominate the legal imagination and entrench a state-centrism which now appears anachronistic in light of the reality of private power and its concentration on the international plane.
The speaker will be Associate Professor Daniel Joyce, who teaches law and justice at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), Australia.
His book Informed Publics, Media and International Law is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
The chair of the event will be Tor Krever, University Assistant Professor in International Law.
In Communications Infrastructure, Technological Solutionism and the International Legal Imagination, an article published last year in Law and Critique and posted online, Professor Joyce offered the following abstract:
This article considers the role played by communications infrastructure within the international legal imagination. It engages with contemporary debates regarding the power of corporate digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. An international legal historical perspective is adopted in order to contextualise international law’s present infrastructural turn and connect current debates over big tech with their precursors. The history of international legal engagement with the development of communications infrastructure reveals a recurring pattern of looking to technological infrastructure for solutions to global problems. This can act to empower private actors and contribute to an ongoing absence of meaningful international legal regulation of communications. The contemporary interest in infrastructure, and its implications in terms of fostering the private power of big tech over global communications, is in many ways a return. But it could also take account of alternative visions for international law which were present at key moments during the League of Nations era and the Cold War. Connecting current debates with those earlier moments in international legal history can help to highlight and counter continuing patterns of technological solutionism within the international legal imagination.
The article’s approach was described:
First, I examine the implications of turning to infrastructure as a way to order the world and in response to the rapid technological changes involved in digitalisation. I consider the potential and problems associated with thinking about international law as infrastructure. A key danger involves returning to a form of technological solutionism in imagining the future for international law. This connects with wider concerns regarding the power of private digital platforms and the networked communicative infrastructure they maintain for trade, commerce and information flows. Turning to infrastructure may result in a failure of the international legal imagination in so far as it results in strengthening private forms of monopoly power and precludes alternative ways of governing technology.
Second, I consider the evolution of international organisations in late nineteenth and twentieth century infrastructure ordering, with a focus on telecommunications. The standard account here is one focused on international organisations as emerging in response to increasing patterns of globalisation and consequent requirements for interstate coordination. But considering this earlier history reveals other factors at play including colonial competition for power and resources. Also, too often underemphasised is the role that non-state actors such as private corporations and transnational commercial interests played in the development of the international legal system. Focusing on international law’s earlier engagement with communications infrastructure can help bring these dynamics to the surface. The development of communications infrastructure in the nineteenth century further enabled global interaction, while simultaneously fostering the emergence of transnational corporate power acting in concert with, and over time undermining, a state-centric system of international law.
Third, to unravel this story further, and to generate productive resonances with our own time, I examine later debates pointing to the relationship between communications infrastructure and violence. These debates contain important alternative paths for approaching such technologies and provide a wider context for the technological solutionism which has captured the international legal imagination. At a time when idealism and reality collided in the failed experiment of the League of Nations, technology was configured as futuristic and modern. It was conceived both as a means to further peace and stability, but also as a threat to it. Concerns regarding state control and manipulation of communications infrastructure continued through to the Cold War and underpinned later moves to liberalise the telecommunications sector and downplay the role for public international regulation of the internet.
Its conclusion:
This article engages with the infrastructural turn in international law by considering the history of communications technology and its place within the international legal imagination. This focus reveals a longstanding blending of public and private power in the creation and governance of communications infrastructure. It also offers a way to trace the role of technological solutionism within the international legal imagination and to evaluate its continuing effects. Further, the article examines alternatives to technological solutionism with resonance for current discussions regarding international legal regulation of big tech. For example, the League of Nations period witnessed significant debates over communications infrastructure and its connection to modernity and violence. And the subsequent Cold War confrontation involving global communications saw a return to interwar preoccupations with misinformation and propaganda.
While the new technologies driving change and re-appraisal within the contemporary international legal imagination are clearly distinct, viewing infrastructure as regulation in the current day requires us to confront continuing patterns of inequality and exploitation in the development of communications technology. There is also a need for international law to address a tendency to look to technology for solutions without an accompanying ambition to restrict its capacity for harm. Uncritically turning to technology for answers, or as a metaphor for an innovative and infrastructural international law, risks the continuation of patterns of response which fail to effectively regulate private forms of power on the international plane. Today private power over global communications infrastructure has only magnified, but it was present from the beginning.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)